Facebook’s XMPP/Jabber integration is not quite completed yet, but meanwhile you can use Facebook from within Pidgin.This plugin isn’t only for pidgin, but other libpurple messengers (perhaps even Adium and other projects). It syncs with Facebook Chat IM service without the necessity of an API key. Though its relatively stable, there are some bugs like the friend does not appear online or replies are delayed, etc. But a very good idea, at any rate. It’s clearly a work in progress.

One of the Facebook plugin features that I really enjoy is the ability to set your facebook status through Pidgins status.

The pros of using the plugin are pretty obvious - all your contacts are  integrated to one place on Pidgin. That equates to one less reason to log directly into Facebook and this in turn saves some time and makes you a bit more more productive. Pidgin keeps logs of all IM conversations, which is handy if you want records of your conversations kept.

Image Credit: http://www.makeuseof.com/

The plugin can perform tasks besides send/receive messages, including the adding and removing of friends, having your facebook notifications be received from Pidgin.

Installation is simple on Debian based distros since they provide .deb package. If you’d like to install the the plugin manually, you would usually copy one of the .so files into /usr/lib/purple-2/ or /usr/lib/pidgin/ (for Mamemo based operating systems). You can also built from source typing

sudo make libfacebook.so
and
sudo make install to point the install to the right directory.

You can get the plugin here: http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

Edit: Also note there’s an icon pack which can be downloaded here: http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip. Extract facebook_icons.zip to ‘/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols’. Though, this blog no longer caters to Windows users, I can only speculate Windows may have a similar directory for the icon pack, but in in ‘C:\Program Files\’ (\Pidgin) which is roughly the equalivent of /usr/share.

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head -15

(I made it display the 15 most used commands, instead of the top 10)

480 su
143 cd
137 ssh
137 startx
86 htop
52 make
43 slocate
37 dmesg
32 iwconfig
30 sh
12 cat
10 rm
9 irssi
8 exit
7 ls

I use root way too much, am frequently changing into directories, frequently on remote computers, frequently initializing an X session, frequently using process viewers, frequently maintaining groups of programs, frequently finding files by name securely, frequently printing and controlling the kernel ring buffers, constantly configuring my wireless network, frequently using shell , frequently in the need to concatenate files and print their outputs, frequently removing files and direcorties, frequently using irssi, and always in constant need to list files in a directory.

Mercurynews writes: “U.C. Berkeley student’s Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt”

Journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a loud demonstration, and forced him in a jail cell last week, but they weren’t prepared for him to Twitter his way out of there.

He was taking photos at a protest, when the police grabbed him. Before he was released they also grabbed his camera memory chip. But they forgot about Twitter.

Twitter net contacted Cal and the American Embassy. In short, UCB hired an Egyptian lawyer and got James out.

Read more here: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8934411?IADID

Flock Testing, finally getting back to Flock blogging.

Hmm.

Tags: flock, broswer, web, test

In honor of Pi Day, here I prsent you Hard N Phirm with their song ‘Pi’. The lyrics are here (Provided by LeoLyrics) . If you want to hear a recitation of pi digits again, YTMND is there for that.

Hard N’ Phirm also has a new video, CPBS: Trace Elements - posted a few days ago.

Shane M. Mathews developed this neat feature under the Google Summer of Code 2007 program. OO Impress prsentations are being renovated and getting a face-lift. It could be a cure to dreary PowerPoint presentations we’re used to seeing.

• Flipping tiles
• Outside turning cube
• Revolving circles
• Turning helix
• Inside turning cube
• Fall
• Turn around
• Iris
• Turn down
• Rochade

Sys Requirements and Driver/X.org compatibility:

It’s not required that you install compiz, but the graphics and rendering specs are comparable to Compiz’s demands.It’s said that 2.4 will come sometime March 2008. If you’re not so patient, an experimental dev snapshot binary for Linux is available (only for Linux now . You can fetch it off BitTorrent(yes, it’s solidly legal) here.

Cheers,

Larry

So, last weekend I went to SCaLE(the 6th annual So. Cal Linux Expo) A great weekend it was. It was hosted at the LA Westin Hotel. I happen to man at the Ubuntu booth(of course we[myself and the Ubuntu California LoCo] weren’t official affiliates of Ubuntu) -which wouldn’t be made possible(and awesome) without the main architects of it all, Neal(Ubuntu-California LoCo Group Leader), Nathan. The convention exceeded my expectations and then some. And it was PACKED!

Just to give you a general sense of perception

Photo Credit: http://lxer.com

ArsTechncica also has coverage over SCaLE: http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/02/12/ars-at-scale-the-exhibit-hall

If you key in closely on the Ubuntu booth picture, you can see me(looking down) I’m adjacent to Nathan(guy in the tan shirt), relative to his left; troubleshooting this lady’s issue with Kubuntu and her wi-fi.

Photo Credit: arstechnica.com

I guess that could present proof for the skeptics.

Anyway, I attended on Saturday(the main expo day). And it was very lively and although from ones perepective, the place may look small, it’s not as small as you would think;it accommodated about 80 booths( Like Sun,Google,RedHat,OpenMoko,Linux Astronomy ,Fedora,LinuxChix,Tux Droid,BSD,and all the other major Linux/Open source companies,and many many more). All of the booths, and what they presented was awesome. Our booth had countless visitors- we were quite a big attraction at the Expo. I came in the expo floor with Greg early around 8:30 A.M after we had been finished with all the ticket processing and clerical stuff. We set up the booth early and found just enough time to go to Jono Bacon’s keynote(He’s the Ubuntu Community Manager if you didn’t know). It was situated in the Westin Hotel theater was packed side to side- there weren’t enough seats, so we had to stand in the back with 50 other people. There was also another theater in the back that had big projector display of Jono’s presentation for those who couldn’t make it in the main theater. He was a relaxed and engaging while still delivering his theme about the achievements of the Linux desktop. He made wanted us to know that success from the Linux Desktop doesn’t come from the companies but from open-source community. He had a few humorous(He’s British) snippets during the presentation. The conferences were awesome, I attended Seth’s(Member of our LoCo Seth Kenlon’s talk) presentation on Video codecs- which to Seth’s amazement had quite a few laughs, including mine. It was very informative and insightful. Another that I “managed” to attend was “Peace, Love, and Rockets,” presented by HP Chief Linux Technologist Bdale Garbe . It about the world of model rocketry, avanonics in general, and how his hobby influenced into the realm of open source software and hardware. And his fights and dilemmas with the proprietary closed sourced/ and not to mention horribly documented devices involved in hobby model rocketry.

In the sum of it all, the convention was productive and awesome. At the end I got to meet and shake Jono Bacon’s hand. I wouldn’t change anything about this year’s SCaLE, they perfected this one! This was a great experience, I look forward to SCaLE7x.

Working with an Arkansas Law Firm/Wal-Mart/and Tysons Foods? Take those ‘35 years’ and subtract it by 28 and get her actual experience, 7 years working in the New York senate. Altough the opposing candidate Obama may not have that many years in the Senate - his extensive resume and past careers is no where near comparable.

Sigh…….

Curse you Hilary, it’s really a shame.

Comic from Cyanide & Happiness series by Explosm.net.

Image copyright @ Explosm.net.

This guy seems to have too much time on his hands, but that’s an understatement. Despite that, he’s quite talented and waggish.

If you irritated with top’s inability to scroll and are looking to opt to an alernative- look no further than htop!

<|Shrinked to Fit column width-double click for a larger dimesion|>

What’s so unique and special about it?

1. Visual Load monitors are nice and help
2. Color schemed
3. The interface is can be modified: colors, view modes, columns and pretty much everything else not noted.
4. Very customizable-I can view processes in tree mode and view dependencies like in Gnome-System-Monitor
5. You can scroll!!!!!!! and works with your mouse
6. Nice Search feature
7. What else do you need? Pretty and functional in CLI.

Note Ubuntu users and others alike. If you use the apt package manager and have the right sources and you simply type in your broswer of choice(well I shouldn’t say that, Firefox in my circumstance)

apt:htop

Have fun htop.

-Larry

This guide is only intended for those who implement WEP /WPA-PSK /WPA2-PSK encryptions

Before we begin the actual guide, a few preliminary things on the agenda:

Find your wireless card’s Interface Name; you must know the proper interface of the wireless connection. To find this you can use the lshw command Which lists certain hardware details. Since you only want to discover network interfaces you find that by executing the following command:

lshw -C network

the flag -C displays the alias for the given class of the hardware. I choose it over ‘lspci/’lsusb” as it prints me a more accurate description.You may see multiple interfaces, find the one that parallels the wireless device in question.

Also make sure you have the configured your wpa_supplicant. The package, look here: http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/

And here’s my output:

*-network
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 00:17:3f:3c:b8:02
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ndiswrapper+netmw245 driverversion=1.45+Belkin,08/30/2006,1.0.1.8 ip=10.10.10.3 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11g

Yes, the dreaded Belkin pre-N adapter using poorly written marvel chipset drivers, netmw254 being one of them. Currently using the g specification since I returned the corresponding Belkin route. In any event, I just should get back to topic.

For a WEP Connection(assumed you have your ASCII password or 64-bit/128-bit hex key)

To initiate connectivity you must execute the following commands in command line

sudo ifconfig <logical name> down

[<<this brings down the interface for the specified interface>>]

sudo dhclient -r <interface/logical name>

[<<Release IP address akin with specified interface>>]

now with the IP address released we bring up the interface

sudo ifconfig <logical name> up

[<<this brings up the interface for the specified interface>>]

Now the ESSID/Password entry, commands are as follows:

sudo iwconfig <logical name> essid "essid_must_be_entered_in_quotes"

Now for the ASCII password entry or hex key

sudo iwconfig <interface> key 's:ASCII KEY' [<< discern the s: prefix as it is needed, do not use quotes>>]

or

sudo iwconfig <interface> key HEXKEY

Now we specify the mode, by default my infrastructure mode is ‘managed’,but the modes aviable managed (default), ad-hoc or master. In managed mode, it forces the wireless to attempt and connect to the specified ESSID and nothing else.

sudo iwconfig <interface> mode Managed [<< ah-hoc and master is also aviable>>]

Now we request an IP address from our DNS server

sudo dhclient <logical name>

Same story with WPA-psk/WPA2-psk, just make sure you configure wpa_supplicant properly in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

In some cases you might need to run wpa_supplicant.conf. Also if you’re

In some instances, an atheros chip set would most likely have the madwifi(assuming you have it installed)

My input was: sudo wpa_supplicant -w -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Usually the output of a successful connection results in something like this. Here’s my output

It attained the IP address of 10.10.10.3 in my output.

This guide was heavily referenced from kevdog from ubuntu forums

Cheers! You never know when the GUI might fail you.

-Larry

The theme of the presidential election made clear to everyone

via Youtube by Hugh Atkin
Music:feat. Bowie

Here’s a video clip of Prof. Steve Sawin of Fairfield University rapping about Perelman’s Proof of the Poincaré Conjecture [wiki], to the tune of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell William’s “Drop it Like it’s Hot.” Link [YouTube] | Steve’s website

Diz be the words n’ shit, graciously provided in .pdf format yo’: Words

Check it that shit out B!

Your Grade: A

98% You Passed with an Excellent Score!

I could pass an 8th grade science quiz! Yay.. congrats to me.-_-.. This couldn’t be made possible without the educationally stimulating support of MY own 8th Grade Science teacher. The renowned Pete Accardi! Give him props, without him This ‘achievement’ wouldn’t be made possible! Other people that deserve honorable mention; not limited but including Gregory

Here’s to you Mr.Accardi!

If you fold a bank note and obscure it in a way where it matches onto a photo of a Celebrity, for instance, President  Grant over Pitt, never mind that doesn’t sound too promising. Anyway the outcome looks really witty.  You can glance at more on  freakingnews.

Photo: freakingnews

For all of those in their head in the gutter, FILF stands First Lady Intent on Liberties and freedom; Coined from The Daily Show.

NOT FLILF

Janet Huckabee 

Elizabeth Kucinich

 Confirmed FLILF

Thoughts-Opinions-Questions-Ramblings-Rants-Complaints-Suggestions-Proposals

-Ideas-Recommendations?

Remember how I said Guake might have some issues? Well it does, but I don’t blame it, it’s still in alpha stage. When I attempt to run Guake, I get the following error message:

"Guake can not init! Gconf Error. Have you installed guake.schemas properly?"

Since I didn’t compile this from source, but instead install a packaged .deb(deb can be found from the official Guake site,.deb this causes a few conflicts. A few reasons being

1) It doesn’t comply with the Debian policies in where configuration files should be placed. There are two ways to fix this. The long counterintuitive but simple way using Synpatic(or whatever package manager you use) . For all practical purposes I’ll show how it’s done in Synpatic. We’re looking for what directory the guake.schemas file was installed. Search guake in synpatic(Edit>), or ctrl+F.Navigate to properties of the package, look under the Installed Files tab. That way you’ll find exactly what and where the package placed the files. Look for guake.schemas. A command line way, a much quicker way if you don’t want to opt the synpatic mess, is searching it with the slocate/locate/find command. It might take a few instances to index all the files,but it’s my preferred way.

In root type

updatedb

After you’ve indexed your files, search for for guake.schemas, I used slocate:

Contacting the Guake dev, he issued me this command to properly install the schemas file(assumed you’re using GTK)

gconftool-2 –install-schema-file=/usr/local/etc/gconf/schemas/guake.schemas

My guake.schemas wasn’t located in

/usr/local/etc/, but /usr/etc/gconf/schemas/guake.schemas.

Have fun with Guake!
There are other alternatives of Guake, check out Tilda(Added true transparency!) and Yakuake(Yet Another Kuake)for KDE. Guake is just a GTK+ of all these.

Cheers!

-Larry

Everything2.com explains how to crack a key less entry pad on a vehicle

.

There’s no real excuse as to why I haven’t been active on ma blag; moreover, the readers. I’ve reached an all time low hit traffic, ~53 visits in 15 day intervals, that’s comparable to… ± 4 visits a day.That’s a little beside the point. The point is I’m back! Came across a really neat utility, Guake, a drop down terminal for GNOME. Quake+GNOME, kind of…. It shares the same drop down functionality you’ll find in a traditional drop-down consoles of first person shooter games..What’s so special about Guake is it gives you the ability to work in terminal without switching in between windows. Saves a great deal of time, especially if you use CLI on a regular basis. Still in alapha, so don’t be shocked if you encounter issues. I’ll be watching this project closely.

http://site.guake-terminal.org/

Google is rolling out IMAP support for Gmail accounts. IMAP provides a better method to access your email from multiple devices. For instance if check your email at school, on your cell, and again at home, IMAP ensures that new inbox is accessible from any device at any given time. IMAP offers a more stable experience over. Where POP by personal experience is prone to lose of emails/ or downloading the same email various times. IMAP is favored of POP cos’ of two-way syncing capabilities between email-clients and web based GMail.

Free solaris 10 dvds mailed to you http://www2.sun.de/dc/forms/reg_us_2307_197.jsp

Mailed to you at no charge.

The set contains

• Solaris 10 DVD for SPARC installations

• Solaris 10 DVD for x86 installations

• Developer Tools DVD

Sun Studio 11

Sun Java Studio Creator 2

Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8

NetBeans 5.0

Uh oh………..

Nah, It’s not by Macro$oft (circa Greg. S. 2005) , just another sourceforge project to make Window apps look like Linux’s.

Win-get is an automated install system and repository for win32 based apps. Written in Pasca(command line Client), also another variant in PHP(just browser based). It also performs silent install, and conveniently deletes the install file. It even uses its’ ‘wget.exe’ to download packages.

One step closer to Linux, but a million steps needed to come close to Linux.
Next step, get rid of Steve Balmer.

• Get the dependencies
• Get the source
• Configure and Install (Estimated time: 3-4 minutes of installing.)
• Congratulations and Good day
• This was only tested on Ubuntu 7.04
  

Note, compiling from the source doesn’t necessarily give you all the proper dependencies. That’s why you implement apt-get. Fortunately I found out all the required packages. You can choose which ones you’d like to install, but in my opinion, all are either required or recommended for Pidgins functionality.

 

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr-dev gettext libnss-dev

Autogen also needs these files above ^^. If you desire spell checking, add libgtkspell-dev in the command. If you’d like to install every single dependencies/package from Pidgin/Gaim. Formly. All packages can be upgraded to latest via apt-get respoitories .

This installs a bunch of dev packages. Also make sure the package “build-essential is installed! The reason that it’s ‘gaim’ . Is when Ubuntu 7.04 was released, Pidgin was known as Gaim(obviously). As such, the ‘build-dep’ for gaim is used to get the deps for Pidgin 2.02.1.

Alright, now download the latest source code. Get the latest from www.pidgin.im . If you’re installing this purely from the terminal. In my case the latest stable version if 2.02(by the time of writing it’s version 2.02). Just ‘wget’ the file via sourceforge.

http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pidgin/pidgin-2.0.2.tar.bz2

Now extract it. And Change directories

tar xvfj pidgin-2.0.2.tar.bz2 cd pidgin-2.0.2

./configure

make

sudo make install

That should be it. Find it in Apps&gt;Internet Pidgin …..You should have no problems with package dependencies. Remember apt-get will not upgrade the newest Pidgin for you . So do this until Ubuntu imports Pidgin in it’s repositories, you’ll have to upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon, later on. Like most will.

Have fun with Pidgin.

The dilemma about Firefox under Linux is that its form widgets look a tad bit indecent.Thankfully, Osmo Salomaa created a nice set of replacement widgets that really clean up the interface, and the assemblage over at Ubuntu forums compiled up a quick script for installing/removing the widget patch. It’s a big upswing, unless you’re into the whole super-aliased, shadow-casting widgets, Windows GUI based kinda thing. Comlied by Fatsheep on Ubuntu Forums

Current Ver: 2.6 is released (July 11th 2007)

Before:

After:

Instllation is straight forward and simple, cd to the directory you extracted the firefox widgets to and execute install script (./install command). Now you’re exposed to the Firefox Widget Installer, make sure you are installing to the path of your Firefox directory. By default script installs to /usr/lib/firefox, as does installation location when installing firefox. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be your directory, unless you could give a good reasonnn.

Good day, and have fun with widgets mod -Larry

Bill Gates, the omnipotent giant from Microsoft is not the richest man on earth. Carlos Slim, has a richness esteem(or account I should say) in US$67.8 billion ,taking Bill’s place. American Móvil company, which is the most superlative and largest mobile cell phone company in Latin America. It’s the largest and most profitable business of Slim. Gates still has a small quantity of U$59.2 Bi. And keep in mind that he gives a great portion of his money to charity, otherwise he would be substantially richer then Carlos.

Vista just not selling, Billy?

Blog Life Update: I’ve recently been REALLY lenient posting on this thing. The last time I posted was during April Fools. More or less, ~ 3 months without posting. School is out, summer is in.

∞

I came across this program that will install Ubuntu, It creates a virtual HDD partition ,installation into a loopmounted virtual partition, with no partitioning necessary. So you can run both Windows & Ubuntu Linux. It Works somewhat like virtualization software.The peeps at Webi say that Ubuntu is installed within a file in the windows file system (c:\wubi\disks\system.virtual.disk), and this file “tricks” Linux to assuming that it’s a Hard disk. Although this is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows, there is speculation that it will be official in the near future. Fo